Hasta La Gadget!

Often when you hear minimum spec doom and gloom, it proves to be wildly inaccurate, or only part of the picture. This time, however, it’s worth a closer look. PC Magazine‘s Sascha Segan is confidently citing the director of Enspert, a Korean consumer electronics company (which recently announced its own Android tablet), who claims that Honeycomb will require a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor. He’s also confident that Motorola’s tablet will be the first device to market with the new version of Android, and his other minimum specs line up with the idea of Honeycomb being initially a tablet-only release. Apparently 1280 x 720 is going to be the minimum resolution, with screen sizes “as small as” 7-inches, though it sounds like 10-inches could be the default. These specs seem to clearly leave out Galaxy Tab, along with anything else on the market or soon to arrive that doesn’t have a Tegra 2 chip. It also makes sense that the Galaxy Tab 2 is going to be using Tegra 2 — Samsung clearly won’t be deterred.

And how about phones for Honeycomb? The picture is decidedly murkier, other than the fact that we could see a temporary splintering of the platform while tablets show off their new Honeycomb digs, with enough battery to back up that dual-core proc. Of course, dual-core handsets are right around the corner, so we doubt handsets will be without Honeycomb for long — Google should know which side its bread is buttered on. There’s also the possibility that this Enspert source is only talking tablets, and phones (which are required to push way fewer pixels, and have much stricter battery requirements) will get a pass on the dual-core requirement altogether. No matter what, you should settle in for a year of entertainment as Google continues to iterate its wildly successful operating system, and manufacturers strain to keep up.

[Thanks, Jason]

Honeycomb to require dual-core processor, initially tablet-only? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Jan 2011 20:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Selling 10 million units of any product in its first six months of initial release is nothing to scoff at. In the world of smartphones, it’s certainly a number to notice.

That’s why our eyebrows perked up when we read Samsung’s e-mail this morning, announcing that the company’s Android-based Galaxy S model has sold more than 10 million units worldwide since its debut in late June.

It’s an admirable number, although not quite in the same league as Apple, which sold 14.1 million iPhone 4 phones during the third quarter of 2010. And it definitely gives RIM reason to worry: RIM sold 12.1 million phones in the third quarter, down 2.8 percent from the previous quarter, according to Comscore data released in November.

The battle for operating system share has been heated between the big three contenders: Apple’s iOS, Android and RIM’s Blackberry OS. But Android has seen a surge in attention in 2010. More than 40 percent of U.S. customers purchasing smartphones over the last six months have chosen Android-based phones, according to a recent report released by Nielsen, beating out the percentage of people who chose Apple, which rests at 26.9 percent.

But in the same Nielsen data, Apple shows its slight (if dwindling) edge in the overall number of phones out there. Apple’s iOS has an overall U.S. market share of 28.6 percent, edging out Android, which rests at 26.1 percent. RIM’s Blackberry OS comes in only slightly behind Android at 25.8 percent.

There’s been a steady upward trajectory of Android-based phone sales over the past two years. Motorola’s Droid sold an estimated 100,000 units over the weekend of its release in late 2009. It took the Droid 74 days to reach the 1 million mark, according to research firm Flurry Analytics.

But it took Samsung a month less to reach the same point with the Galaxy S. The company said it had sold 1 million in the first 45 days since launch.

Photo: aaronage/Flickr

Updated 3:59 p.m. to clarify Nielsen report is based on United States user data.

No money? No problem! The world of craptablets has grown significantly over the past dozen months, and you won’t find us encouraging anyone to add another to the pile. But AOC has actually managed to make a fairly decent name for itself over the years, albeit one in the LCD industry. In fact, this here company claims to be the world’s largest manufacturer of LED / LCD monitors, but it’s tough to say how that type of expertise will translate in the tablet arena. The newly launched Breeze bucks two screen size trends and splits the difference — there’s an 8-inch touchpanel here, complete with an 800 x 600 screen resolution and a row of physical keys along the right edge. You’ll also find a Rockchip processor, an outdated copy of Android 2.1, not to mention a USB 2.0 port, 3.5mm headphone, inbuilt speaker, 802.11b/g WiFi, 4GB of internal storage space, a microSD card slot and a battery that’s supposedly good for up to 12 hours of audio playback or (six hours of video). We’re still waiting to hear back on what type of CPU is under the shell, but for under $200, we’re going to hazard a guess that it’s not the quickest silicon in the shed. Anywho, it’ll be splashing down at “major retail chains” later this month, likely going toe-to-toe with Augen for your bargain-bin bucks.

Continue reading AOC’s 8-inch Breeze Android 2.1 tablet goes for broke, sells for $200

AOC’s 8-inch Breeze Android 2.1 tablet goes for broke, sells for $200 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Jan 2011 09:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Even at its default 1GHz speed, Samsung’s Hummingbird is one of the finest mobile processor around, but are you really going to complain about getting the option to crank an extra 200 milion clock cycles out of it? Morfic over on the xda-developers forums has delivered a kernel permitting Nexus S owners to achieve just that, although he still has to fix an issue that disables the phone’s Bluetooth capabilities.Still, if you value ludicrous speed over wireless peripherals, the source link is your friend.

Nexus S overclocked to 1.2GHz, runs too damn fast for its Bluetooth to work originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Jan 2011 06:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Let the Tegra 2-powered, Android Honeycomb tablet announcements begin! Apparently (and understandably) staying away from a Folio 2 moniker, Toshiba is kicking off CES with its new unnamed 10.1-inch Android tablet, and we have to say from our brief look at a non-working unit a few weeks ago, it may just have what it takes to stick out from the rest.. at least on the spec and manufacturing quality front. The tablet has a capacitive, high 1280 x 800-resolution display along with an accelerometer and ambient light sensor (or what Toshiba has dubbed as Adaptive Display technology). It also has a 5 megapixel rear camera as well as a 2 megapixel front-facing one. Yep, this one is well stocked and just a quick look at the pictures below will show that the slab has got full sized USB and HDMI jacks, a single mini-USB socket, and an SD card slot.

While we couldn’t turn on the dual-core Tegra 2-powered tablet, which will eventually run “the next version of Android designed for tablets” aka Honeycomb, we have to say the EasyGrip, spill-resistant, rubberized back felt really solid in hand and the 1.7-pound, .6-inch thick tablet felt comparable to the iPad in terms of portability. Oh, and did we mention that the aforementioned rear cover is swappable, so not only can you change its color but you can replace the battery? We told you it had some of the ingredients to make it go far, but we’re obviously lacking quite a bit of information here to make any further decisions. Toshiba’s maintaining that the tablet will be released in the first half of 2011 (it obviously has to wait until Honeycomb has been made official) and the pricing will be competitive, but we’ll be digging for more when we get to Vegas and hopefully reporting back with some impressions of a working unit.

Toshiba announces unnamed Tegra 2-powered Android tablet, waits only for Honeycomb originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Jan 2011 03:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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